Bonnie Tijerina March 11th, 2008
What are you thinking about this year at ER&L? Submit your thoughts to the ER&L Thought Cloud. The topics submitted most often will be discussed on the final day of the conference!
gchilton February 24th, 2007
In Lili Li’s presentation on Emerging Technologies for Academic Library Information Services, it was mentioned that Microsoft has not come out with a new version of FrontPage.
As I understand Microsoft is abandoning FrontPage and is developing Microsoft Expression, a suite of products to compete with Adobe/Macromedia Studio 8.
Has anyone experimented with MS Expression or thinking about trying it out?
(While myself and my colleagues really like Macromedia Studio, our campus is a die hard Microsoft one.)
cindybassett February 23rd, 2007
I have just discovered a super cool climbing wall in Atlanta called Atlanta Rocks: http://www.atlantarocks.com/ . I am a rock climbing novice, but I think this looks like a super-fun thing to do on Saturday afternoon. There is an instructional class at 1:00pm on Saturday and will provide instruction and everything you need to get started for the low, low price of $35.00.
Interested in coming along? Email me at cindy dot bassett at sos.mo.gov.
Charlene Barina February 5th, 2007
Checking out the attendee map, looks like we’ve pretty much saturated the US. We’re definitely not feeling the upper midwest love, though - even Hawai’i has some people! A couple of states not representing in the northeast, like Rhode Island, too. We have quite a few Canadian folks coming out too - 5 provinces - and a few international presenters. Looks to be a neat group of people coming out…Remember, registration ends January 7th - and there’s no on-site registration! Don’t forget to RSVP for the pre-conference reception!
Charlene Barina October 30th, 2006
I’m still playing around with the concept, but I first read about micropublishing several months back in the New York Times (the article unfortunately costs money now, but the link is here.
It’s a bit different from finding someone local to publish and more like a hybrid with such services as cafepress, where you create apparel with logos or designs you make that are printed on an as-ordered basis. The micropublishers give you a variety of options, ranging from submitting a pdf to standalone custom design software to put together books based on a few different templates and styles. Most all of them offer a hardcover option in a few different shapes (portrait, landscape, square little books) with a nice dust jacket and glossy pages as if it were a “real” book. Pricing depends on quantity, size, and sometimes colors used, depending on the site. Also depending on the publisher, you can make books with as many as 400 pages.
The micropublisher I’ve chosen to try out is Blurb, partially due to their nicely designed website 
According to the now-hard-to-get-to NYTimes article, it also supposedly had the best interface for book creation; it feels google-like in its implementation, which to me means semi-intuitive and slightly bubbly. It does have some confusing but supposedly easy buttons - I’ve had experience where I change a layout and my content disappears, never to be found again, but that may be to my version being an older beta copy. After you’ve completed your book, you can “publish” it publicly to the Blurb bookstore, where you can direct friends to check it out or discover random strangers who really like your topic. They’re still working on getting an ISBN service set up though, for those of you who plan to seriously market your creation. Like cafepress, though, you can’t set a price above the typical Blurb book cost. Thus you can have the warm fuzzy glow of being while embracing the hip/edgy starving artist persona.
From the sites, the book styles and layouts remind me of the Williams-Sonoma line of thin cookbooks with themes like “Beef” or “Pasta”. They have some page and book templates that are thematic, such as “Blog Book”, “Cookbook”, “Picture book”, which gives you a starting point with the variety of layouts. I chose to make a cookbook of my favorite recipes from friends, family, and random self-experiments.
I found it neat to be able to edit the cover, the inside author picture/bio on the dust jacket, the front pages, and section headers and indices in addition to the expected “average” reading page. I also learned about how time-consuming putting together even a 30-page book, between wanting to prepare the meals to take pictures of technique and final product. I’m trying to enlist a friend who likes to take photos of food, but it hasn’t worked out yet.
Given that Blurb only has hardcover options, and the proprietary software, which, last I experimented, didn’t allow text document import, I don’t see this as being a great venue for those who want to publish their next great novel. It’s also obviously not designed for electronic distribution of the content, either. I do see it as a neat way to publish a travelogue, a office yearbook, or a going-away present that would really be able to leverage the full-color capabilities of Blurb. When my cookbook’s done, I’ll try to post the link here just for grins.
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